Thursday, August 19, 2010

August 19th, 2010: The Hand has just returned from its 11th successful outing.... Mile High Music Festival in Denver, Colorado.

It was almost a year to the day since its last outing, which was at the 2009 Oakland Fire Arts Festival, and which was arguably somewhat less successful! It was at that show that the pinkie and thumb actually RIPPED off the Hand, necessitating a pretty significant set of repairs and upgrades!

The main upgrades that the Hand received, which were within the last month, were a total re-design of the individual finger joints (which made them MUCH stronger) and the rotation of all the exposed hydraulic cylinders on the back of the Hand (which put all the plumbing INSIDE the fingers as opposed to exposed on the outside; compare the following picture with some of the very early pictures from Burning Man and you can see the difference.) These modifications have made the Hand much more able to withstand the punishment it suffers all the time!

One nice thing we had this last weekend in Denver was a little electric trackbot, courtesy of my friend Zack Bieber of The Machine Lab, which made the re-positioning of the crumpled-up cars a LOT easier.